@MarkTamis I change over time, daily, monthly, annually – so will my friends and followers. I’m here for my Self @bduperrin @ITSinsider.

and that was the end of that conversation, apparently. I’ve been known abruptly end conversations every now and then, but I usually have an intend to do so then.

Anyway, I think the question is not so hard – in real life, do you propagate points of view you don’t endorse yourself? Maybe if its family involved, or employees – those two nasty situations in our life when we are confronted with people we didn’t choose from the start ourselves.

But what about your friends? Didn’t you choose themselves? Aren’t the people on Twitter those that you carefully selected and handpicked yourself? I know mine are.
And the people that follow you on Twitter – what would you compare them to? People you didn’t choose to block, at best? You just can’t pick someone to follow you, really…

I love being out on Twitter, but I couldn’t possibly state that I’m here to please my followers – that is turning things upside down. Of course I like the fact that people follow me and sometimes interact, apparently others like what I want to say just as well as I do – that’s good! But if I really loved my followers like crazy I’d be following them, and not the other way around.

It’s almost like Twitter is us in a different world – it’s not. It is us in this world, via another medium. People go crazy over Influence on Twitter, claiming they’ve found the Holy Grail while it’s still to be found in the day-to-day world. I’d think by now we’ve experimented enough with what works, and doesn’t work – and found out that we operate under pretty much -if not the exact- same Laws and Agreements as we use in our daily life when we meet face-to-face.

There is a situation of course where one would be compelled to ReTweet someone else’s tweet without fully endorsing it: it’s when the clear division between handpicked people to follow and “begotten” followers is grey-shaded by a new species: the family-Tweeter, or, even worse perhaps, the colleague-Tweeter.

I have a few family-tweeters out here, and once had a whole bunch of colleague-tweeters. I followed 300-400 of them via one list, and do you know what I found out?They were intolerable as a whole. Just seeing the few tweets from 10-20 people (hey, only 3%-5%!) I didn’t particularly like, ruined my entire experience. I handpicked a few to follow, and dropped the entire list pretty soon.

Be careful with what you ReTweet. Those scarce “blank endorsement-tweets” might ruin someone’s entire experience of following you.

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Founder of We Wire People, Martijn has 15 years experience in the field of Integration, as an Architect working in and for Enterprises. He mainly advises in case of mergers, application rationalization and Cloud / Social Media back-office integration
Martijn blogs at martijnlinssen.com